WAS OBAMA'S REMARK A MISTAKE?

Not many people thought so.

"You didn't build that," statement by President Barack Obama on businesses was not a gaffe. It was as true as saying that business owners did not build the roads, tunnels and bridges that they used to ply their businesses everyday; did they?

Did they ever thought of how those facilities came to be in existence? They just made use of them to conduct their businesses; and probably claimed that they had every right to use them, because they paid tolls and taxes for the "infrastructure", that any sensible person knew the president was referring to in his remark, to be there whenever they needed it.

The Internet was a good example, that people have utilized it to become rich, but they did not care a hoot as how it came into being. It was designed and formulated by government researchers over many years before its simplified version became available to the general public.

Now, everyone could have a "store front" on the World-Wide-Web, just at the click of a button on the computer, and could access any amount of information that was needed to resolve whatever problem that he or she might have without bothering to know how it happened. All that it required was to gain entry to the Internet. Did the user build it (Internet)? Of course not.

Mitt Romney and his campaign staff have been making politics so cheap that anything was for grabs, and could be made fodder, just to get some attention. He was running against Obama as the Republican Party candidate in the 2012 presidential election; and so far, he has failed to tell the American people his reason for being a candidate in that race.

His sole assertion was that he could "create jobs and get the economy back on track," which his followers and his big money spender friends were helping him to push on the electorate through their huge campaign donations. Yet, has he the record to back that up?

The answer was a resounding "NO".

As governor of Massachusetts his state was 46th in job creation out of the 50 states. The unemployment rate was continually high for months on end; and the population of that state has gone down, owing to droves of people leaving for work elsewhere. That completely demonstrated that business savvy did not equate good governance.

His business references were not all that attractive, as with Bain Capital, where the main objective of the company was to make profit at the expense of businesses in financial trouble.

It wouldn't be right to condemn the whole private equity industry, which Bain was (and still) part of; but its reputation was one of almost every project by the company ending in a fiasco, as in North Carolina, where hundreds of workers were laid off, and a whole community was devastated.

That has happened in so many other states, where factories were closed and manufacturing plants were moved overseas to make up for the loss in the United States.... and if that wasn't outsourcing, nothing could be classified as such.

The only plan that people thought he had was for him to give tax breaks to big banks, corporations and businesses; but that was still the "old school" economics, which has led to the enormous fiscal predicament that the country has been facing, since the latest Republican administration. (...and we love president W. Bush for getting rid of Saddam Hussein).

In other words, the Obama administration did not create the mess that the nation was in; and as the adage, "it takes money to make money" applied under the circumstances, it (administration) had to borrow from other countries, like China, the U.K. and Japan to support two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Otherwise, where would the money to pay for the wars and for the running of his government come from? He had the option to raise taxes on businesses and individuals, but that would have made matters worse. Unemployment would have been as high as 15%, and the economy would have been in a disastrous situation than now.

Romney's claim that "Obama denigrates business success," and that he was the one to straighten things out should be taken with a grain of salt, because his approach to redeem the present state of the economy was not anything new. It has been tried before, and it has failed the country.